


Waking Hours

by recrudescence



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is wrong. He'd seen her for the first time in years and it hadn't been the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking Hours

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to the Porn Battle prompt: Egypt.

Spine straight, upper lip stiff; Simon Tam can’t give a damn. Not while he’s writhing out of sleep with a gasp in his throat and a mouth on his neck.

Dark, icy air, his sister grinning into the black while Simon had to hide his face. But she had been smiling long after they climbed back inside, dazzled by the pattern of stars and planets against the sky. River, born gifted, now grown and gutted. She shredded her mattress at the Academy to keep them from shredding her mind; he’d found out, piecemeal, about her futile little mutinies. Little Mouse, with her mousy little voice, anxious little hands, sulky and sullen most of the time now.

Something is wrong. He’d seen her for the first time in years and it hadn’t been the same. _Playing with her brain_. Raindrops beading along a spider’s web. The drinks the ancient Egyptians fed the slaves.

He shook off sleep completely and his sister frowned down at him.

“Simon.”

He couldn’t move.

Shaking and shuddering at night, most nights, and Simon would give her all he could. Medicine, soothing words, open ears, open arms. Different, this time.

Soft, uncombed hair in a cloud around her face. Stripped naked, fitfully turning away when he gaped, in his room and bed and he was hard from the friction and biology, and River said so, of course, her back turned. “Application of heat and motion will effect stimulation.”

As flatly as reading a text file.

And, carefully, she leaned back in, touched warm fingers and dry lips to his bare chest—and kissed him there almost clinically, like a child playing a grown-up’s game. Small flat nipples, small dry lips, dark wisps of hair evident where slim thighs primly pressed together.

Lost his fortune, his position, his home, all for her, and if this was some twisted way of giving it back, giving him a semblance of something normal, that just made him feel even more terrible. River looking up with wide, blank eyes. Guilty little mouse. Fell into a trap and had to be rescued.

“You don’t…” He couldn’t form the words. _You don’t need to pay me back, mei-mei. You don’t owe me anything._

“I know.” She said it like it was obvious, like he really was an idiot child. Implying that she wasn’t the one who’d come up with the idea. That she’d found it somewhere else.

“Get dressed.” He could never have imagined it, not consciously. Here in this swirling rattletrap of a boat, anything seemed possible sometimes. Anything that might mean making her squirm with pleasure instead of fear or frustration, make her smile the way she had outside the ship, eyes wide with stars and wonder. If it were only that easy. Cryogenically stabilized, naked and terrified and tumbling into his arms, and he had _hoped_.

“You wanted,” she said. “Wanted, wanted.”

“No. Not like…River. No.”

“And I, in my corner, snarlin’,” she snipped at him.

The pharaohs had done it. Seen it as a step forward instead of a leap back, evolution instead of indignity. Simon wished he were too stupid to know as much. “How about getting something to eat?” he tried instead, going for a lighter tone, a we’ll-put-this-all-behind-us tone. His voice was shaking when he threw his blanket around her shoulders.

River didn’t even look his way. “Hopscotch and marmalade.”

She’d been five when she somehow found out about hopscotch. It hadn’t caught on among her friends and he’d been less-than-willingly recruited into helping her play. Leaping through some antique game like street urchins, then running inside for tea. He could remember, but tried not to.

“No marmalade, I’m afraid,” he said. Pleading inwardly: please, let that be enough to keep her on that train of thought instead of any other.

“The ninth Ptolmey; they called him Chickpea. He married both his sisters and made his daughter marry her stepson,” River intoned, rising. He watched, knees drawn up, jaw cinched tight, sheet clenched hard in both numb hands. She had her nightgown balled up under one arm and the look she gave him at the doorway was almost regretful. “Then he had her murdered and the people tore him apart for it.”

Simon pressed his forehead to his knees and listened to the retreating rhythm of her footsteps.


End file.
